A pervasive problem in flash photography is the so-called “red-eye effect,” in which an on-camera flash reflects off the back of the eyes of a subject, causing the subject's eyes to appear red. The problem is so common that many digital photo-editing applications include an automatic or manual red-eye correction feature.
Some digital cameras are also capable of performing automatic in-camera red-eye correction.
Automatic red-eye correction involves locating the portions of an image in which the red-eye effect appears and replacing the red pixels in the iris of each affected eye with pixels of a predetermined color (e.g., black). The result, though an improvement over the original “red eyes,” still may not look natural to an observer because the true iris color of each corrected eye is not taken into account in the correction process.
It is thus apparent that there is a need in the art for an improved method and apparatus for incorporating iris color in red-eye correction of digital images.